It may be creepy, but at $200, it does a good job of following anyone in the room.

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When Samsung came out with the Smartcam HD Plus, it introduced a solid smart home security camera with some unique audio features at a competitive price. The HD Plus was, and still is, a good alternative to the Nest Cam, and, unlike the Nest Cam, it isn't tied to a cloud subscription plan that holds your videos hostage. Now Samsung is adding a new camera to its lineup, the Smartcam PT, that puts a spin (literally) on the HD Plus.

This $200 security camera swivels and turns to follow any movement it detects in a room, making sure you always have a full view of whatever and whoever is in your home. While its design differs from competing smart cameras, Samsung is hoping that a moving eye will be enough to persuade people to choose Smartcam over the rest.

Design: It follows your every move

The PT in this camera's name stands for "pan and tilt," meaning it can swivel nearly all the way around and look up and down to capture much more of your home than most cameras. According to Samsung, the Smartcam PT can pan 350 degrees, tilt up to 155 degrees, and the camera itself has a 96-degree field of view. Instead of fussing with the placement of the camera, I just set it on top of a bookshelf and used the app to adjust its aim.

The device itself is a small cone with a bulging camera lens on a half-circle at the peak. The black portion of the camera moves while its gray base remains steady. On the back are a power port and a microSD card slot that can hold cards up to 128GB. Unlike the Samsung Smartcam HD Plus, this device doesn't come with a microSD card included, so you'll have to get your own if you want to save any videos locally. The location of the power port is an improvement over the Smartcam HD Plus, which had a power port hidden under the camera head that made plugging in difficult. The PT's power cable fits in the port easily on the back of the camera and doesn't have to fight with the design of the camera at all. On the underside are the reset and Wi-Fi buttons, and the only time you'll have to turn over the camera is to access the Wi-Fi button during setup.

The PT's Wi-Fi activation process is identical to that of the Smartcam HD Plus—you have to connect to a network provided by the camera and then the app will allow you to connect to your home's Internet network. Once the camera is set up, it appears in the app as the name you gave it (such as living room, hallway, etc), and that's where you can edit the camera's individual settings. The Smartcam app connects to all of Samsung's Smartcam devices, so if you have existing cameras, you can use them and the Smartcam PT at the same time and control everything within the app.

The Smartcam HD Plus was a small camera that mimicked the Nest Cam in design, but I prefer the style of the Smartcam PT. Its cone shape is inherently linked to its stand-out feature, but even if it didn't have the pan-and-tilt function, I would still like a camera built like this in my apartment. The minimalist, cylindrical designs of the Netatmo Welcome and the original Canary cam make them pleasant to look at and allow them to (almost) blend into room decor, but I appreciate the small footprint of the Smartcam PT. Canary has jumped on the small-camera bandwagon with the debut of its pill-shaped Flex cam a few weeks ago. The Flex is even narrower than the Smartcam PT, but it doesn't have the PT's pan-and-tilt perks.

Samsung's Smartcam PT, in privacy mode.

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The underside, with the reset and Wi-Fi buttons.

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Privacy mode casts the lens downward and turns off the camera.

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It can hold a microSD card up to 128GB.

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Features: Targeted videos with all the essentials

Much like the Smartcam HD Plus, the Smartcam PT records 1080p video, but you can change the resolution while viewing the livestream in the app. Low-, medium-, and high-resolution settings let you choose the amount of detail you want to capture and how much footage you can save to the local SD card (lower-resolution video takes up less space, of course). The pixellation was noticeable on the low setting, so I kept my camera on high-resolution most of the time. The only time the high quality video ever looked pixellated was when the camera turned from side to side quickly to capture a newly detected movement or sound.

The PT's main selling point is its pan-and-tilt feature. In addition to catching moving objects, the camera sometimes even responded to sounds in other rooms of my apartment if they were loud enough and turned in the direction of the sound's origin. This was hit-or-miss most of the time, but when it did happen, the camera often captured the source of the sound (me, one of my family members, or my boyfriend) coming out of one room and into my apartment's living room.

You don’t expect the camera to follow your every move, but it does. Even moving just a few feet to the side makes the Smartcam PT's eye refocus to your new position. Thankfully, there's a privacy mode you can enter via the app's lock icon. That turns the eye of the camera down into its base and turns off the device so it can't record anything in the room. I used this when I was home since I didn't need the Smartcam PT to track my every movement and sound.

The Smartcam PT's schedule feature lets you set times of the day when the camera goes into privacy mode on its own. It's similar to the scheduler on the Blink camera system: you choose days of the week and blocks of time during those days in which you don't want the camera to record or alert you to anything. I made my camera sit in privacy mode for most of the midday hours during the week, but even after you set a huge chunk of time, you can tap on blocks of individual hours to disable privacy mode.

Video edited by Jennifer Hahn.

For example, I set my PT to be in privacy mode from 8am to 11pm each weekday, but I could tap on the 10am block to have the device turn back on for only that hour. The only problem I found with privacy mode is that you can't edit any of the camera's settings while in it—the app prompts you to temporarily disable privacy mode before you edit anything. Once you're done changing settings, the camera goes back into privacy mode on its own (if you pulled it out of a scheduled privacy time block) a few minutes after you close the app.

The PT records and saves detected motion and audio events on its own, but you can also record video via the live stream in the app to either the SD card or to your smartphone. You can even use arrow buttons to direct the camera, and those controls can be used to manually change the angle of the camera’s POV. Overall, the Smartcam PT’s pan-and-tilt design really makes a difference in the footage it collects since it can zero-in on people or other moving objects in the room. The video itself is constrained by the camera's 96-degree field of view (which is less than others, like the Canary's 147-degree FOV and the HD Plus' 130-degree FOV). But at least all your saved videos will put the subject front-and-center and reduce the chance of you missing action.

The PT has all the same audio features as the Smartcam HD Plus, including two-way talk, customizable recorded audio messages that you can play through the camera, and sound effects like an alarm and a simulated barking dog. Two-way talk is arguably the most useful of all those audio features since you can chat in real time with whoever is in your home. That's handy for anyone who has kids who come home before they do or pets that need vocal consoling from their human friends. Otherwise, the preset sound effects are invaluable if you use them to frighten someone who breaks in.

When night vision is turned on, the PT automatically uses its embedded IR technology when it detects low light. Like most smart security cameras with night vision, this turns the video footage almost black and white, but it is otherwise unnoticeable if you were to walk through the room where the camera is placed. On high resolution, my night vision video footage was crisp, and it used both the camera's IR features and the small bits of light in the room to create a comprehensible image. Night vision was similar to regular recording in that the only time it became pixelated was when the camera shifted to refocus on a moving subject. That issue only lasted for a couple of seconds before the video regained its typical quality.

Like the Blink system, the Smartcam PT doesn't have a subscription attached to it, meaning you can save as much footage as your SD card can hold. Any events that are detected by the camera will automatically be saved to the memory card, but, while viewing the live stream, you can choose to manually record to the SD card or to your smartphone. Upon examining footage via the SD card on my computer, I found that a one-minute clip at high resolution took up 13.8MB, while a nearly two-minute clip took up 24.9MB. If you never want to worry about running out of space, you can turn on the "SD card overwrite" feature in the app's SD card settings, and the camera will save the newest video clips by recording over the oldest footage.

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Valentina Palladino
Valentina reviews consumer electronics for Ars Technica, testing all kinds of gadgets with a focus on mobile devices and wearables. She has a soft spot for Chromebooks. Twitter@valentinalucia